Don Walker on Cold Chisel and other words

Don Walker is renowned as one of Australia's best songwriters. He spent an afternoon with ABC Newcastle's Carol Duncan to talk about music, his love of language and the challenge of moving from performing with Cold Chisel to being his own frontman.

He just does not talk about the personal stuff. But he does talk about himself, about music and words and prose and work and Chisel and just about anything else you choose to throw at him.

He speaks slowly, deliberately, and laughs with a quiet, low rumble. Don Walker is also very dry and very funny.

Once a scientist who worked on Australia's F111 program, Don says he worked for a little while with "whatever modest skills I acquired in aerodynamic engineering. I can't say I was very good at it."

Words matter to Don Walker and it's obvious that language is a great love for the man who has written some of Australia's most iconic rock songs, "I think my love of words, language and humour - which is very much part of it - comes not so much from reading but from listening to regional speech in Australia, listening to the way people talk."

"I love the enormously intelligent use of language that you get in regional and grassroots Australia. I like to laugh and Aussies say stuff that makes me laugh all the time. I try and write in a way that's close to conversation, and the conversation that I know is the way that I talk, and the people around me whose company I enjoy, talk."

Don Walker grew up in Grafton on the north coast of NSW and says there was little choice in radio listening, "Where I grew up there used to be two stations. 2NR was the ABC station on the north coast, and the local commercial station was 2GF. So 2GF was where you went for music; they didn't play any music on the ABC except for classical programs, so the music that was played on the local commercial station was the music we heard."

"It was a peculiar kind of faux-country music; a lot of American stuff, but some Australian stuff, and in that curious period between Elvis and The Beatles. Elvis hit and then it all went quiet when he joined the army, but The Beatles hadn't happened yet, so there was a fallow period there where all sorts of wild and wonderful but now-forgotten things happened in music."

"Last year, a mate of mine who grew up in the Wheatfields in WA told me he'd seen a movie called 'The Tree of Man' which I haven't seen but apparently it's the greatest movie of the last 10 years or so. In this movie he was shocked into that period of 1960 listening to commercial radio. He and a friend who worked in a record shop gathered three CDs of what was on the radio in that period and gave them to me. It's a real shock to listen to them because these are not songs that are widely played since, so to listen to three CDs of them now plunges me straight back to sitting on a verandah on a farm when I was 10 years old. It's wonderful stuff. 'Big Bad John', quite a bit of Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline."

'Big Bad John' is one of my own musical memories so I suggest to Don that I could probably sing him all the words of it and throw in a bunch of bad trucking songs about the ghosts of little girls to boot.

"That's right!" laughs Don, "Six days on the road and I'm gonna see my baby tonight', or 'Wolverton Mountain', or 'From A Jack to a King', all that kind of stuff!"

Our memories are strongly driven by sounds and smells and I suspect that as we get older, the guilty pleasures we have in music from years ago and may not have admitted to previously, are now songs that we love and will play loud in the car with the windows down, perhaps to the horror of our kids.

Don Walker is one of Australia's most esteemed songwriters so of course I had to take the opportunity to try to get him to confess his musical sins to me.

"There's plenty of stuff that I can go back to and I'd only admit between you and I that at a certain stage I was very passionate about 'Blood, Sweat & Tears'. It is interesting to go back and listen to stuff now and see if it sounds as good as I thought it did at the time. 'Blood, Sweat & Tears' now sounds appalling! If you put on 'Bitches Brew' (Miles Davis) now, it sounds pretty good. So, there are examples like that, 'bad fashion' things that you do in any era."

"I'm sure among the stuff I'm listening to and liking now there's some pretty horrible stuff. You're going to ask me what?"

Yes. But Don isn't telling.

I share with Don that I had recently played The Beach Boys' 'Pet Sounds' in the car for my kids to listen to because I think it's one of those things that pre-dates my own record collection but still sounds wonderful. Indeed, 'Pet Sounds' was released in the year of my birth. So even if the lyrics are a bit cheesy, if something was beautifully recorded and produced does it redeem it somewhat for him?

"Well, you can't dismiss something just because it has cheesy lyrics, any more than you can dismiss something because it has cheesy music. Often in those combinations there's treasure."

"But The Beach Boys, I never got it, or I never bothered. I think because when I was young, nobody in the band could actually play - nobody could do a solo - and when I was 20 or 25 that was important. But I've been doing a lot of long car trips over the last few years and a couple of years ago I bought a 'Best of The Beach Boys' and listened to it and started to wake up as to why so many of my musical friends are fanatical Beach Boys fans. Not so much musicians, but people in the music business, radio people and music journalists. I started to get it, to realise that this wasn't just another pop group, there's actually something unique and extraordinary that's happened here and everyone else is just imitators. I kinda knew that, but I never got it myself. Now I do."

Don Walker is perhaps best known as Cold Chisel's main songwriter and through that band gave Australian rock music fans a new voice. With 40 years of songwriting under his belt, does the legacy of songs like Khe Sanh - released in 1978 - weigh on him?

"Well, it's nice! There's a good living in that kind of thing. But once songs like that go out and are adopted by people as part of that canon of what they like to listen to, then it becomes a little bit remote to me."

"The last five years or so, occasionally, I've done Khe Sanh myself with just piano, but that sounds utterly different so I can kind of own that again. It becomes a story with some chords, but it doesn't sound remotely like Jim (Barnes) and Cold Chisel on the radio because I can't sing like that. I'm very proud of it. We were a bunch of young guys and we did some good stuff. It's good that people like that and it holds up decades later, but it's a little bit remote from my daily life."

"I didn't sing Khe Sanh originally. I just wrote it and showed it to the other guys in the band. Jim's been singing it as an integral part of what he does live, but not me. Neither are any other Cold Chisel songs. It's just in the last few years I started doing this other version of it. I wasn't avoiding it in all that time, it's just that it's not something that sounds like what I do, and it's not the way that I sound when I sing."

"With such a song that's as widely loved as that, if I get up and sing it somebody might yell out, 'That's not how it goes!' he laughs, "The other thing is it's got a lot of words and everybody else knows them better than I do so what if you get half way through and you get stuck?!"

In 2009, Don released his book 'Shots' - a collection of short autobiographical pieces. Reading 'Shots' reminded me of the way Leonard Cohen uses words, but Leonard Cohen makes me wonder just which words are lies.

"I don't think songwriters lie, but they certainly make stuff up. Is that lying? It's an essential part of songwriting."

"Many years ago I was listening to someone do an interview with Paul Kelly, and they were digging in way beyond, 'What comes first, mate, the lyrics or the music?', they were digging in to just what happens and how do you come up with lyrics,"

"Paul said, 'I make stuff up.' I burst out laughing, I thought that was brilliant. Of course, you make stuff up. Is that lying? Yes, definitely. Sometimes it can tip over if you pretend it's the truth. So if me or Laughing Lenny write something that is not fiction but purporting to be a factual account, but that tips over into something that didn't actually happen, well ... you're on the edge."

Where does Don Walker place the Canadian wordsmith, Leonard Cohen?

"The big attraction for Leonard Cohen, and like The Beach Boys I've become a Leonard Cohen fan late in life - never took much notice of him before the last five or ten years but the big attraction is his humour. I don't think anything has got much legs if it hasn't got humour. You can look around and look at all the recording artists in history and divide the ones who have humour from the ones who don't. And that's a pretty profound thing, that really sorts them out, and Leonard Cohen is one of the funniest people out there, and one of the driest in his lyrics. And that's why now, late in life, I buy every Leonard Cohen album."

Jimmy Barnes, of course, has deflected a lot of the heat of Cold Chisel's success from the rest of the band, but after Chisel disbanded Don Walker has put himself up front.

"It's never all about me, even when you're up there in front of a band. It's about the songs and the story. You're trying to put that over and connect. You're trying to whisper in the ear of everybody who's listening, whether you've recorded something that's being played on the radio or if you're playing a big show and there's thousands of people there. It's just one person trying to communicate to one other, and in some situations there's a lot of 'one other'. It's not about 'you', the person standing up there."

"The fascist thing about it is that people can't talk back," laughs Don, "And for people in our position, the beautiful thing."

I find it interesting to think about how songwriters see their own work given how precious it can sometimes become to others. To fans. To listeners. We listen, we love, we lose. We perhaps get married to the words in these songs. Live our lives through them. Die. We carry them with us and consider which of them we'd rescue from our burning house or take to a desert island. But how does the songwriter, the storyteller, see them?

Don chips me about just wanting to ask what his favourite song is, but I think it's more complex than that and he concedes it's difficult to answer.

"There's a lot of stuff over the decades and I don't think of them as valuable or otherwise. Although there's a few things I've written that I would regard as 'value-less', but I'm not going name them. I admire people who use their songs to help people - that has value - but the songs I value most often have no correlation between how good a song is in my eyes and how well-known it is or how much money it's made or anything like that. It's not an inverse correlation either."

"Probably one of the most - in my heart - beautiful songs I've ever written I wrote about 15 years ago - at the turn of the century! When I wrote it I thought, 'This is going to be massive all over the world because it's such a beautiful song', and I wrote it about a personal situation but it was universal, it had what I thought was a beautiful melody, it was simple, and it had everything that I thought was good about songcraft. And yet, everybody who heard it in the publishing world acknowledged how good it was but I couldn't get it recorded."

"So that's what I'd call one of the top five songs that I'm proud of and yet nobody knew about it for 13 years."

"But Missy Higgins has just recorded it and done a stunning version of it (The Way You Are Tonight) and now people are hearing it. In the meantime, there's a lot of other songs I've written that are enormously popular and have been all over the airwaves that I didn't think were nearly as good."

Don Walker is a storyteller, but are there stories he hasn't been able to get out yet?

"Yes, yes there are. There are things like that that have hung around in the back of my head for a long time, but they're difficult to describe because describing them will be in the song or in the prose writing and I haven't figured out a way of doing that yet. Where they live now is in pictures and movies and landscapes and feelings and maybe a few scraps of words."

How does he know when the song is done? When the words are finished? When to stop and leave it alone?

"You just know. It's like a big bell goes off. 'This is right now.' And it's something that is the same with a piece of prose writing. I can't explain that but I utterly know when something's right. At the same time, the reverse side of that is that you utterly know when something is not right. But knowing it's not right doesn't mean that you know how to get to where the bell goes off. I've put things out without waiting for the bell to go off, when they're not quite right but good enough."

Will he tell me what they are?

"No. But there's an internal thing that defies all logic. Surely, all of these things are subjective. What is right to one person is not right to another, but there is something in me - and I know it exists in others - where it's not a subjective thing, there's an utter certainty when something is right. And a nagging, cold dissatisfaction and itch when it's not."

Meanwhile, after a 40-year career in the music industry, Don Walker is still touring large shows with a full band, and smaller intimate shows to just a few dozen people.

"The beauty of doing things like that is to deliberately put myself in a situation where I didn't know if I could pull it off and I had to do some work. I had to do a lot of preparation and figure out a lot of things I hadn't had to figure out before to make a show of that length work with just me and the piano."

I suggest that to do so is gutsy.

"It's not so much the size of the audience. It doesn't really matter. It's what's going on onstage. In that situation I have no band and nothing to hide behind. So I have to make it work with those few tools. That's confronting. I did a night in Nundle and it worked. The night I did in Mayfield, the first set didn't work. I just couldn't make it work. The second set worked and everybody got it and we all had a good time."

"I'm hoping that they didn't feel like it was a waste of their time. That they're thinking, 'That was a worthwhile thing to do'. That's what I'm wishing and hoping for. People's time and attention is valuable and if you're going to use it up you've got to do something worthwhile, make it work, and try and figure out a way of transporting them into the stories."

"Sometimes you don't manage that and if you don't manage that, well that's a failure and instead of transporting them somewhere, you've seat-belted them into a dark little room for an hour when they could have been enjoying themselves."

When all is said and done, what does Don Walker feel he's gotten right?

"The things that I've done right have nothing to do with music because they're far more fundamental things than that, and they're not public things. There haven't been many of them and there's a lot of things I've done wrong. But they're the things in the end."

"While I've been doing this interview, I've got a call from my daughter. It's in that world where you really succeed or fail. If there's a couple of things I like myself for, it's in that world."

And with that, I encourage Don Walker to go and call his daughter.

Don Walker is performing at Lizotte's Newcastle on Sunday 26 October on his The Perfect Crime tour.